With its ample paper capacity and fast speed, the OKI Printing Solutions C5650n color laser can handle relatively heavy-duty printing in a small office or workgroup.

For small offices and workgroups with relatively heavy-duty printing needs, the three key issues for choosing a printer are most often speed, paper handling, and price. The OKI Printing Solutions C5650n touches all those bases, with fast speed, ample paper capacity, and a price of just $450 (street). As a bonus, it offers high-quality text and reasonably high-quality graphics. Unfortunately, it drops the ball on photo quality, which is an issue if you plan on doing important photo printing.

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The C5650n is built around an LED engine that OKI rates at 26 pages per minute (ppm) for black-and-white and 22 ppm for color. (LED printers are essentially identical to laser printers, except that they use LEDs rather than lasers to draw the image of each page during the printing process.) It divides its 400-sheet default paper capacity into a 300-sheet paper drawer and a 100-sheet multipurpose tray, so you can keep two different kinds of paper loaded and also use a variety of paper stock easily without having to swap out the paper in the drawer. The 400 sheets is more than enough for most small offices, but if you need more, an optional second drawer ($229 list) can boost capacity to 930 sheets.

The one important paper-handling feature missing from the C5650n is duplexing, the ability to print on both sides of the page. If you need to duplex, however, a variation that has an automatic duplexer, the C5650dn ($590 street), is available. You can also start out with the C5650n and add the duplexer as an option later ($179 list).

Setting up the printer is standard fare. Like most color lasers and LED printers in its price range, the C5650n is relatively big, at 13.4 by 17.1 by 22.1 inches (HWD). It's also heavy enough, at 57 pounds, that you'll probably consider lifting it a two-person job. The good news is that finding a spot for it and moving it into place is the hardest part. All that remains for the physical setup is to remove the packing materials, load paper, connect the cables, and turn it on.

Installing the printer on a network is also standard, with a fully automated installation routine. I installed the driver on a Windows XP system, but according to OKI, it also comes with drivers for Windows XP x64, Vista and Vista x64, Server 2003 and 2003 x64, Windows 2000, and Mac OS X version 10.2.8 and later.

Once you've set the printer up, get ready for some pretty impressive performance. On our business applications suite (timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software, www.qualitylogic.com), it scored a total time of 7 minutes 36 seconds. That's the fastest time for any sub-$1,000 color laser we've tested. As one point of reference, the similarly priced Editors' Choice printer in this category, the Xerox Phaser 6180N, took 10:22.

The catch for the C5650nand what keeps it out of contention for Editors' Choiceis output quality. Text and graphics output are both of reasonably high quality, but graphics are a touch below par, photos are well below par, and even text suffers from a minor problem.

The good news about the text is that more than half of the fonts on our tests were well formed and easily readable at 5 points, with almost half passing both thresholds at 4 points. As with other OKI printers, however, the toner is shiny enough to reflect light from certain angles under some lighting conditionswith a desk lamp, for examplemaking the print hard to read. You may not mind this at all, or you may find it annoying.

Graphics from the C5650n offer eye-catching, vibrant colors but suffer from several troublesome flaws. The two biggest issues I saw were obvious posterization (shading changing suddenly where it should change gradually) and misregistration (thin slices of white showing between blocks of color that didn't line up properly). In addition, I saw some lesser problems, including visible dithering in the form of mild patterns in some colors. The output is certainly good enough for any internal business need, including PowerPoint handouts, but it's well short of the quality most people would want for items like trifold brochures or mailers going to potential clients or customers.

Photo quality was well below the norm for color lasers. In most of the photos on our tests, colors were simply beyond any reasonable definition of realistic, in some cases to the point of being garish. In addition, both light and dark areas tended to lose detail, so photos with predominately dark colors looked darker than they should have. The quality is good enough to print Web pages with recognizable photos, but not suitable for things like client newsletters, much less marketing materialsat least, not if you're trying to convey a sense of professionalism.

If superb output quality for text and graphics is a must, or you want to print your own marketing materials, the C5650n is the wrong choice. But given its speed, paper handling, and reasonably high-quality text and graphics, the C5650n is easy to recommend for any small office or workgroup that doesn't consider top-quality output critical and needs to push a lot of paper through the printer.

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About the Author

M. David Stone is an award-winning freelance writer and computer industry consultant. Although a confirmed generalist, with writing credits on subjects as varied as ape language experiments, politics, quantum physics, and an overview of a top company in the gaming industry. David is also an expert in imaging technologies (including printers, moni... See Full Bio

OKI Printing Solutions C5650n

OKI Printing Solutions C5650n

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